Pages

5/16/2018

Haiku

Never enough shawls,

cast on and begin again.

Savor the moment.

This spring, I had the honor of designing the pre-KAL shawl for this year's Jyväskylä summer knit fest. The idea is that because it's so hard to wait for the festival to begin in July, there's a KAL to help take the edge of waiting. And this time, I got to design the shawl pattern for the KAL.

The pre-fest KAL works such that when you buy yarn for the shawl from TitiTyy, you get the pattern. This time, they chose TitiTyy's very own Tukuwool Fingering - one of my favorite yarns. It took with me a couple skeins of Runo and Ujo and started sketching.

I wanted to design something relaxed yet flamboyant for the yarn. The pattern has to have enough to keep the knitting interesting but still remain a relaxing project. Tukuwool is such an airy yarn that I started to think brioche.

I love working with brioche and garter stitch which it is often paired with. However, I don't like how usually garter stitch next to brioche is worked such that the color changes on every row. It makes the colors all mixed up and muddy. I wanted to design a shawl with brioche and more traditional two row stripes in garter stitch. This way, the shawl turned out quite graphic: the garter stitch makes horizontal stripes while the brioche makes vertical stripes.

The shawl is an asymmetric triangle. You start knitting at the sharp top corner and increase the stitches a little at a time. Once the shawl body is big enough, you will pick up stitches from the bottom edges and work a brioche chevron edging.

I really, really like the outcome. And this is a design that will work well with many different kind of color combinations. I myself tend to go for these powdery, muted combos but the graphical stripes of this shawl would look really good in high contrast as well.

So hop on board the KAL. You can get the pattern with the yarn from TitiTyyä (or from my Ravelry shop once the festival is over) and here is the KAL chatter thread where you can talk about your color choices, oh and ah over all the lovely shawls or ask for help. Use the hashtag #jklknitfesthaikukal on social media and come to the festival with your shawl for the group photo!